On February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations – I was born a crime.
It took me long enough to pick up Born a Crime that I thought, by now, I knew the full meaning of the title – that having a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother made Trevor Noah's very existence a criminal act – but it wasn't until I actually read it that I realised how much more insidious the plan of apartheid's architects: South Africa was divided into more categories than simply “black” and “white” (including “colored”, “Indian”; the black folk divided by ancestral tribe with the learning of each other's languages discouraged), and with his light skin, Noah didn't fit into any category; not only could he not be seen in public with his father, but with a dark-skinned mother, he couldn't be seen in public with her (or anyone from her family) either. I suppose it's a poor reflection on me that when I look at Trevor Noah I see a black man, but when he was growing up, the kids around him considered him white; a confusion and a degree of separation that followed him throughout his school years. In his book, Noah recounts his childhood and coming-of-age as apartheid began to crumble, and with his trademark wit and charm, he had me by turns laughing and crying; this book was an education for me, and in a way, a love letter to his remarkable mother:
My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will. Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that my mother started her little project, me, at a time when she could not have known that apartheid would end. There was no reason to think it would end; it had seen generations come and go. I was nearly six when Mandela was released, ten before democracy finally came, yet she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom could exist. A hard life in the township or a trip to the colored orphanage were the far more likely options on the table. But we never lived that way. We only moved forward and we always moved fast, and by the time the law and everyone else came around we were already miles down the road, flying across the freeway in a bright-orange piece-of-shit Volkswagen with the windows down and Jimmy Swaggart praising Jesus at the top of his lungs.I remember being in Chem class in 1985 when our teacher – the stereotypical mumbly-mouthed and nerdy science guy, with greying and greasy hair flopped over thick-framed glasses, and chalk residue palmed down the legs of his baggy dress pants by the end of every class – came into the lab, rolling a TV/VCR combo, saying, “I want to show you something.” The idea of a movie in our boring Organic Chemistry class got us kids excited, but as it began, what we saw was more confusing than any equation or formula Mr. Kireefe had ever taught to us: This was a documentary on South African apartheid – something not one of us students had ever heard of – and it was matter-of-fact about gruesome violence and allowed nice-looking white people to expose their ugliness through casually racist statements and it explored all the ways in which the black majority of that country were effectively enslaved at a time when we students believed that slavery had ended long before we were born. That this could be going on in the 1980s, and that I had never heard about apartheid in any of my other classes – that it took our weird Chemistry teacher to take it upon himself to show us what we really needed to know about the world – blew all of our minds. How could something as ugly as apartheid have lasted for generations in South Africa and the rest of the world never even talked about it? Mr. Kireefe must have been just on the edge of the changing ethos because it was only a few years later that Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid officially collapsed – but according to Trevor Noah, that didn't mean that life suddenly became easier for black South Africans; racism and poverty didn't abruptly disappear.
The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.Now, to be specific about the book: Born a Crime is a collection of eighteen stories instead of a straightforward chronological record of Noah's life; so each chapter has its own story arc, with some later chapters retelling parts of a previous story in order to fold it into the new story arc – and while this felt a bit unusual as a format, it totally works. This book came out before Noah became the host of The Daily Show, so there's nothing here about “The Industry”, but it was gratifying to learn that he was enjoying success on stage (as a comedian) and screen (as a television host) in his homeland before he made the leap to the U.S. When watching Noah on TV today, I'm always amused by his voices and mimicry, and it was interesting to tie that into his early facility with languages; his childhood attempts to fit in with whatever group he found himself with:
I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.Maybe some of the writing is cliché-ridden, and maybe some of the stories could have been edited a little better, but Trevor Noah had a fascinating life to relate – a narrative of a time and place we shouldn't ignore as though apartheid never happened or was too long ago to affect the world today – and with charm and wit (and a story of a mother that ends in an incredible place), the reading of this book is a highly enjoyable experience. Even when it made me uncomfortable.
Two more stories that couldn't find a place in my review:
I was shocked to see that more than one reviewer was turned off by Trevor Noah's "Hitler" story; a fact that could only mean that those reviewers didn't really understand it. When Noah graduated high school, he started hanging out in a black suburb ("The Alex") and he and his friends got some gigs DJing street parties. One of his friends there was actually named Hitler, and he was an amazing dancer, so Noah added him to the crew. Noah explains that education for black students was so poor that no one would have actually known who Adolf Hitler was - it was just the name of a man who was so powerful that white folks enlisted black folks to help fight him - and never having learned the details of WWII or heard of the Holocaust, Noah's friend Hitler's parents wouldn't have had any bad associations with the name. (Noah also makes the point that every society thinks their own tragedy is the most tragic - if you asked an African who the biggest monster in history was, they'd be more likely to choose Cecil Rhodes or Belgium's King Leopolde.) So the DJ/dance crew had no idea what was so offensive about them performing a gig at a Jewish private school, all the dancers gathered around their star, raising their arms in the air as in any Hiphop performance, and chanting, "Go Hitler! Go Hitler! Go Hitler!" There's uncomfortable comedy and social commentary in that scene - the kid named Hitler, his parents, none of friends, had any idea who the Fuhrer really was, by design of the country's segregated education system - and I don't think the story was meant to offend; anyone offended just didn't get it. (By contrast, I found the "little boy turd" story to be funny, but agree that it went on way too long about the fact that everybody shits, and these are the mechanics of shitting...this was the kind of story that I thought could have been edited better. I wasn't offended, just thought, "So what? Get on with it.")
And Noah told a story about a time his dog ran away, and when he tracked her down, Fufi had found a new little boy to hang with; she refused to come when Noah called her, and in the end, his mother had to pay the new family in order to bring Fufi home again. Noah learned from this experience:
I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.”
And if that's how Noah actually feels about people and relationships, I find that very sad.
